Music Professor Ana Alonso-Minutti Wins Prestigious Publication Award

Associate Professor of Musicology, Ana Alonso-Minutti, has been awarded the prestigious Robert M. Stevenson Award by the American Musicological Society (AMS) for her book “Mario Lavista: Mirrors of Sounds,”(Oxford University Press, 2023). The award ceremony took place on November 16, 2024, at Chicago’s Palmer House Hilton during the AMS Annual Meeting, one of the leading academic conferences in the field of musicology.

The Robert M. Stevenson Award is among the highest honors in the field of Ibero-American music scholarship. It recognizes outstanding contributions to the study of Iberian and Latin American music, which encompass the musical traditions of Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, including Mexico, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. The award highlights both the scholarly depth of the work and its ability to engage with a global musicological community.

Alonso-Minutti’s book was praised by the award committee as a “tour-de-force” that combines extensive and wide-ranging research on the work of Mario Lavista (1943-2021), a leading Ibero-American composer, set within a rich cultural context. They commented on the book’s significant contributions to the recent history of music in Mexico and beyond, offering an innovative scholarly approach that incorporates archival documentation, interviews, and the author’s personal subjective perspective. The committee concluded that the author’s framing of Lavista’s music as a “mirror of sounds,” drawing on concepts from sound studies, feminist theory, decolonial scholarship, and cultural theory, “…is as elegant as it is nimble, spotlighting the Mexican composer’s creation of ‘social space’ through sound.”

The Robert M. Stevenson Award is named after the late Robert M. Stevenson (Melrose, 1916–2012), a New Mexico-born scholar who pioneered the field of Ibero-American music studies. Stevenson’s groundbreaking work in Iberian and Latin American music has influenced generations of scholars and made this award especially meaningful for the UNM community.

With this recognition, Prof. Alonso-Minutti becomes the first scholar to receive both of the awards named after Robert M. Stevenson—one for music composition and the other for music scholarship. In 2021, Prof. Alonso-Minutti was awarded the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Robert M. Stevenson Prize for her choral composition “Voces del desierto.” This four-movement piece premiered in March 2019 at the National Hispanic Cultural Center as part of UNM Professor of Art Szu-Han Ho’s Migrant Songs project, which was showcased during the Revolutions International Theatre Festival hosted by Tricklock Theatre Company.

For more information about “Mario Lavista: Mirrors of Sounds,” which is available as an open-access publication on Oxford University Press’s platform, please visit:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mario-lavista-9780190212728?cc=us&lang=en&;